The God of all Comfort

2 Corinthians 1:3-4 (NIV)

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.      

I have been watching a series on TV I have found very interesting and good distraction in the evening before going to bed.  It is about a family on a cattle farm in Australia.  They have many struggles and lots of hardship, but they pull together as a family.  When it gets too tough for the family to handle alone they reach out to the neighbors who are almost as close as family.

I am in to season three and have become quite entrenched in the characters and their lives (I do this with books too), but last night was different.  As I watched the family move through a major crisis it struck me how typical they are - no faith in God, in fact God was never mentioned in all three seasons that I can recall. I suspect that is true of the most of the world in which we live.

These new friends of mine face every hardship in life without a God who can carry them, who comforts [us] in all our troubles.  This parallel was troubling for me last night. As life does, a major curve ball was thrown at them when death struck suddenly and from nowhere. There was no one to comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. They were on their own.

I turned the TV off at that point but I couldn't turn my mind off.  It was a long time before I was able to get to sleep. This may sound silly to you, getting so involved in a piece of fiction, a television drama, but the writers of all the programs we view, write from life; often from their own life experiences. There are so many lessons for me from that TV program but for today I am made aware of how truly blessed I am to know Jesus and His love and compassion.  

I know, as you probably do too, from personal experience that life will toss us handfuls of hardship and a pocketful of pain which we have to face. If we had to face them alone, without a God who loves and cares deeply, the pain would be unbearable. It is time we Christians remember why we are here, remember the one person who shared Jesus' love with us and do the same for someone else.

2 Corinthians 1